OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Conversational Swarm Intelligence amplifies the accuracy of networked groupwise deliberations
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Conversational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) is a communication technology that enables large, networked groups (25 to 2500 people) to hold real-time conversational deliberations online. Modeled on the dynamics of biological swarms, CSI enables the reasoning benefits of small-groups with the collective intelligence benefits of large-groups. In this pilot study, groups of 25 to 30 participants were asked to select players for a weekly Fantasy Football contest over an 11-week period. As a baseline, participants filled out a survey to record their player selections. As an experimental method, participants engaged in a real-time text-chat deliberation using a CSI platform called Thinkscape to collaboratively select sets of players. The results show that the real-time conversational group using CSI outperformed 66% of survey participants, demonstrating significant amplification of intelligence versus the median individual (p=0.020). The CSI method also significantly outperformed the most popular choices from the survey (the Wisdom of Crowd, p<0.001). These results suggest that CSI is an effective technology for amplifying the intelligence of groups engaged in real-time large-scale conversational deliberation and may offer a path to collective superintelligence.
Automated Assessment of Students' Code Comprehension using LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Assessing student's answers and in particular natural language answers is a crucial challenge in the field of education. Advances in machine learning, including transformer-based models such as Large Language Models(LLMs), have led to significant progress in various natural language tasks. Nevertheless, amidst the growing trend of evaluating LLMs across diverse tasks, evaluating LLMs in the realm of automated answer assesment has not received much attention. To address this gap, we explore the potential of using LLMs for automated assessment of student's short and open-ended answer. Particularly, we use LLMs to compare students' explanations with expert explanations in the context of line-by-line explanations of computer programs. For comparison purposes, we assess both Large Language Models (LLMs) and encoder-based Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) models in the context of assessing the correctness of students' explanation of computer code. Our findings indicate that LLMs, when prompted in few-shot and chain-of-thought setting perform comparable to fine-tuned encoder-based models in evaluating students' short answers in programming domain.
Collaborative Learning with Artificial Intelligence Speakers (CLAIS): Pre-Service Elementary Science Teachers' Responses to the Prototype
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

This research aims to demonstrate that AI can function not only as a tool for learning, but also as an intelligent agent with which humans can engage in collaborative learning (CL) to change epistemic practices in science classrooms. We adopted a design and development research approach, following the Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation (ADDIE) model, to prototype a tangible instructional system called Collaborative Learning with AI Speakers (CLAIS). The CLAIS system is designed to have 3-4 human learners join an AI speaker to form a small group, where humans and AI are considered as peers participating in the Jigsaw learning process. The development was carried out using the NUGU AI speaker platform. The CLAIS system was successfully implemented in a Science Education course session with 15 pre-service elementary science teachers. The participants evaluated the CLAIS system through mixed methods surveys as teachers, learners, peers, and users. Quantitative data showed that the participants' Intelligent-Technological, Pedagogical, And Content Knowledge was significantly increased after the CLAIS session, the perception of the CLAIS learning experience was positive, the peer assessment on AI speakers and human peers was different, and the user experience was ambivalent. Qualitative data showed that the participants anticipated future changes in the epistemic process in science classrooms, while acknowledging technical issues such as speech recognition performance and response latency. This study highlights the potential of Human-AI Collaboration for knowledge co-construction in authentic classroom settings and exemplify how AI could shape the future landscape of epistemic practices in the classroom.
WildGEN: Long-horizon Trajectory Generation for Wildlife
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Trajectory generation is an important concern in pedestrian, vehicle, and wildlife movement studies. Generated trajectories help enrich the training corpus in relation to deep learning applications, and may be used to facilitate simulation tasks. This is especially significant in the wildlife domain, where the cost of obtaining additional real data can be prohibitively expensive, time-consuming, and bear ethical considerations. In this paper, we introduce WildGEN: a conceptual framework that addresses this challenge by employing a Variational Auto-encoders (VAEs) based method for the acquisition of movement characteristics exhibited by wild geese over a long horizon using a sparse set of truth samples. A subsequent post-processing step of the generated trajectories is performed based on smoothing filters to reduce excessive wandering. Our evaluation is conducted through visual inspection and the computation of the Hausdorff distance between the generated and real trajectories. In addition, we utilize the Pearson Correlation Coefficient as a way to measure how realistic the trajectories are based on the similarity of clusters evaluated on the generated and real trajectories.
A Toolbox for Modelling Engagement with Educational Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

With the advancement and utility of Artificial Intelligence (AI), personalising education to a global population could be a cornerstone of new educational systems in the future. This work presents the PEEKC dataset and the TrueLearn Python library, which contains a dataset and a series of online learner state models that are essential to facilitate research on learner engagement modelling.TrueLearn family of models was designed following the "open learner" concept, using humanly-intuitive user representations. This family of scalable, online models also help end-users visualise the learner models, which may in the future facilitate user interaction with their models/recommenders. The extensive documentation and coding examples make the library highly accessible to both machine learning developers and educational data mining and learning analytics practitioners. The experiments show the utility of both the dataset and the library with predictive performance significantly exceeding comparative baseline models. The dataset contains a large amount of AI-related educational videos, which are of interest for building and validating AI-specific educational recommenders.
Minuet: Accelerating 3D Sparse Convolutions on GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Sparse Convolution (SC) is widely used for processing 3D point clouds that are inherently sparse. Different from dense convolution, SC preserves the sparsity of the input point cloud by only allowing outputs to specific locations. To efficiently compute SC, prior SC engines first use hash tables to build a kernel map that stores the necessary General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) operations to be executed (Map step), and then use a Gather-GEMM-Scatter process to execute these GEMM operations (GMaS step). In this work, we analyze the shortcomings of prior state-of-the-art SC engines, and propose Minuet, a novel memory-efficient SC engine tailored for modern GPUs. Minuet proposes to (i) replace the hash tables used in the Map step with a novel segmented sorting double-traversed binary search algorithm that highly utilizes the on-chip memory hierarchy of GPUs, (ii) use a lightweight scheme to autotune the tile size in the Gather and Scatter operations of the GMaS step, such that to adapt the execution to the particular characteristics of each SC layer, dataset, and GPU architecture, and (iii) employ a padding-efficient GEMM grouping approach that reduces both memory padding and kernel launching overheads. Our evaluations show that Minuet significantly outperforms prior SC engines by on average $1.74\times$ (up to $2.22\times$) for end-to-end point cloud network executions. Our novel segmented sorting double-traversed binary search algorithm achieves superior speedups by $15.8\times$ on average (up to $26.8\times$) over prior SC engines in the Map step. The source code of Minuet is publicly available at https://github.com/UofT-EcoSystem/Minuet.
Comparison of home detection algorithms using smartphone GPS data
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Estimation of people's home locations using location-based services data from smartphones is a common task in human mobility assessment. However, commonly used home detection algorithms (HDAs) are often arbitrary and unexamined. In this study, we review existing HDAs and examine five HDAs using eight high-quality mobile phone geolocation datasets. These include four commonly used HDAs as well as an HDA proposed in this work. To make quantitative comparisons, we propose three novel metrics to assess the quality of detected home locations and test them on eight datasets across four U.S. cities. We find that all three metrics show a consistent rank of HDAs' performances, with the proposed HDA outperforming the others. We infer that the temporal and spatial continuity of the geolocation data points matters more than the overall size of the data for accurate home detection. We also find that HDAs with high (and similar) performance metrics tend to create results with better consistency and closer to common expectations. Further, the performance deteriorates with decreasing data quality of the devices, though the patterns of relative performance persist. Finally, we show how the differences in home detection can lead to substantial differences in subsequent inferences using two case studies - (i) hurricane evacuation estimation, and (ii) correlation of mobility patterns with socioeconomic status. Our work contributes to improving the transparency of large-scale human mobility assessment applications.
Future-proofing Education: A Prototype for Simulating Oral Examinations Using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

This study explores the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) in higher education, focusing on an automated oral examination simulation using a prototype. The design considerations of the prototype are described, and the system is evaluated with a select group of educators and students. Technical and pedagogical observations are discussed. The prototype proved to be effective in simulating oral exams, providing personalized feedback, and streamlining educators' workloads. The promising results of the prototype show the potential for LLMs in democratizing education, inclusion of diverse student populations, and improvement of teaching quality and efficiency.
Development of Control Framework for Spine Surgery Robot Using EtherCAT
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

As the more sensors and actuators are used in the robotic systems to provide more features, complexity of the system is increasing. When it comes to medical robotics, it becomes harder to ensure safety and determinism in the system. To deal with increasing complexity and ensure precise periodicity and execution timing for a medical robot, in this paper we report development of EtherCAT master as a part of software framework for spine surgery robot. We implemented multi-axis controller using open-source EtherCAT master running in real-time preemptive Linux. We evaluated the real-time performance of the system in terms of periodicity, jitter and execution time in our first prototype of spine surgery robot.
Digital Infrastructure for Connected and Automated Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Connected and automated vehicles (CAV) are expected to deliver a much safer, more efficient, and eco-friendlier mobility. Being an indispensable component of the future transportation, their key driving features of CAVs include not only the automated functionality but also the cooperative capability. Despite the CAVs themselves are emerging and active research areas, there is a lack of a comprehensive literature review on the digital infrastructure that enables them. In this paper, we review the requirements and benefits of digital infrastructures for the CAVs including the vehicle built-in, roadside-based, operational and planning infrastructures. We then highlight challenges and opportunities on digital infrastructure research for the CAVs. Our study sheds lights on seamless integration of digital infrastructure for safe operations of CAVs.
MATE-Pred: Multimodal Attention-based TCR-Epitope interaction Predictor
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

An accurate binding affinity prediction between T-cell receptors and epitopes contributes decisively to develop successful immunotherapy strategies. Some state-of-the-art computational methods implement deep learning techniques by integrating evolutionary features to convert the amino acid residues of cell receptors and epitope sequences into numerical values, while some other methods employ pre-trained language models to summarize the embedding vectors at the amino acid residue level to obtain sequence-wise representations. Here, we propose a highly reliable novel method, MATE-Pred, that performs multi-modal attention-based prediction of T-cell receptors and epitopes binding affinity. The MATE-Pred is compared and benchmarked with other deep learning models that leverage multi-modal representations of T-cell receptors and epitopes. In the proposed method, the textual representation of proteins is embedded with a pre-trained bi-directional encoder model and combined with two additional modalities: a) a comprehensive set of selected physicochemical properties; b) predicted contact maps that estimate the 3D distances between amino acid residues in the sequences. The MATE-Pred demonstrates the potential of multi-modal model in achieving state-of-the-art performance (+8.4\% MCC, +5.5\% AUC compared to baselines) and efficiently capturing contextual, physicochemical, and structural information from amino acid residues. The performance of MATE-Pred projects its potential application in various drug discovery regimes.
Resilient Path Planning for UAVs in Data Collection under Adversarial Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we investigate jamming-resilient UAV path planning strategies for data collection in Internet of Things (IoT) networks, in which the typical UAV can learn the optimal trajectory to elude such jamming attacks. Specifically, the typical UAV is required to collect data from multiple distributed IoT nodes under collision avoidance, mission completion deadline, and kinematic constraints in the presence of jamming attacks. We first design a fixed ground jammer with continuous jamming attack and periodical jamming attack strategies to jam the link between the typical UAV and IoT nodes. Defensive strategies involving a reinforcement learning (RL) based virtual jammer and the adoption of higher SINR thresholds are proposed to counteract against such attacks. Secondly, we design an intelligent UAV jammer, which utilizes the RL algorithm to choose actions based on its observation. Then, an intelligent UAV anti-jamming strategy is constructed to deal with such attacks, and the optimal trajectory of the typical UAV is obtained via dueling double deep Q-network (D3QN). Simulation results show that both non-intelligent and intelligent jamming attacks have significant influence on the UAV's performance, and the proposed defense strategies can recover the performance close to that in no-jammer scenarios.
Smart Mobility Digital Twin for Automated Driving: Design and Proof-of-Concept
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

During the past decade, smart mobility and intelligent vehicles have attracted increasing attention, because they promise to create a highly efficient and safe transportation system in the future. Meanwhile, digital twin, as an emerging technology, will play an important role in automated driving and intelligent transportation systems. This technology is applied in this paper to design a platform for smart mobility, providing large-scale route planning services. Utilizing sensing technologies and cloud/edge computing, we build a digital twin system model that reflects the static and dynamic objects from the real world in real time. With the smart mobility platform, we realize traffic monitoring and route planning through cooperative environment perception to help automated vehicles circumvent jams. A proof-of-concept test with a real vehicle in real traffic is conducted to validate the functions and the delay performance of the proposed platform.
Spectrum Sharing through Marketplaces for O-RAN based Non-Terrestrial and Terrestrial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Non-terrestrial networks (NTNs), including low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, are expected to play a pivotal role in achieving global coverage for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications in sixth-generation (6G) systems. Although specific frequency bands have been identified for satellite use in NTNs, persistent challenges arise due to the limited availability of spectrum resources. The coexistence of multiple systems, including terrestrial networks (TNs), sharing these frequencies, presents a technically challenging yet feasible solution. Furthermore, the effective management and regulation of such coexistence should be under the purview of regional authorities. To facilitate efficient spectrum sharing among various systems, including NTNs and TNs, adopting open architectures is desirable, allowing for the seamless exchange of key information for spectrum sharing. Therefore, it is essential to consider open radio access networks (O-RAN) for future NTNs and TNs. In addition to O-RAN, the establishment of spectrum marketplaces, enabling different operators to trade their spectrum and dynamic resource allocation information, is necessary. In this article, we highlight the role of spectrum marketplaces and discuss a few examples.
Unified Pandemic Tracking System Based on Open Geospatial Consortium SensorThings API
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

With the current nations struggling to track the pandemic's trajectories. There has been a lack of transparency or real-live data streaming for pandemic cases and symptoms. This phenomenon has led to a rapid and uncontrolled spread of these deadly pandemics. One of the main issues in creating a global pandemic tracking system is the lack of standardization of communications protocols and the deployment of Internet-of-Things (IoT) device sensors. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has developed several sensor web Enablement standards that allow the expeditious deployment of communications protocols within IoT devices and other sensor devices like the OGC SensorThings application programming interface (API). In this paper, to address this issue, we outline the interoperability challenge and provide a qualitative and quantitative study of the OGC SensorThings API's deployment and its respective server. The OGC SensorThings API is developed to provide data exchange services between sensors and their observations. The OGC SensorThings API would play a primary and essential role in creating an automated pandemic tracking system. This API would reduce the deployment of any set of sensors and provide real-time data tracking. Accordingly, global health organizations would react expeditiously and concentrate their efforts on high infection rates.
LLM4EDA: Emerging Progress in Large Language Models for Electronic Design Automation
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2023
Year: 2023

Driven by Moore's Law, the complexity and scale of modern chip design are increasing rapidly. Electronic Design Automation (EDA) has been widely applied to address the challenges encountered in the full chip design process. However, the evolution of very large-scale integrated circuits has made chip design time-consuming and resource-intensive, requiring substantial prior expert knowledge. Additionally, intermediate human control activities are crucial for seeking optimal solutions. In system design stage, circuits are usually represented with Hardware Description Language (HDL) as a textual format. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their capability in context understanding, logic reasoning and answer generation. Since circuit can be represented with HDL in a textual format, it is reasonable to question whether LLMs can be leveraged in the EDA field to achieve fully automated chip design and generate circuits with improved power, performance, and area (PPA). In this paper, we present a systematic study on the application of LLMs in the EDA field, categorizing it into the following cases: 1) assistant chatbot, 2) HDL and script generation, and 3) HDL verification and analysis. Additionally, we highlight the future research direction, focusing on applying LLMs in logic synthesis, physical design, multi-modal feature extraction and alignment of circuits. We collect relevant papers up-to-date in this field via the following link: https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/Awesome-LLM4EDA.
Process Mining for Unstructured Data: Challenges and Research Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

The application of process mining for unstructured data might significantly elevate novel insights into disciplines where unstructured data is a common data format. To efficiently analyze unstructured data by process mining and to convey confidence into the analysis result, requires bridging multiple challenges. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these challenges, present initial solutions and describe future research directions. We hope that this article lays the foundations for future collaboration on this topic.
Analog Circuit Sizing Using Machine Learning Based Transistor Circuit Model
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2023
Year: 2023

In this work, a new method for designing an analog circuit for deep sub-micron CMOS fabrication processes is proposed. The proposed method leverages the regression algorithms with the transistor circuit model to size a transistor in 0.18 um technology fast and without using simulation software. Threshold voltage, output resistance, and the product of mobility and oxide capacitance are key parameters in the transistor circuit model to size a transistor. For nano-scale transistors, however, these parameters are nonlinear with respect to electrical and physical characteristics of transistors and circuit simulator is needed to find the value of these parameters and therefore the design time increases. Regression analysis is utilized to predict values of these parameters. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method by designing a Current Feedback Instrumentational Amplifier (CFIA). We show that the presented method accomplishes higher than 90% accuracy in predicting the desired value of W. It reduces the design time over 97% compared to conventional methods. The designed circuit using the proposed method consumes 5.76 uW power and has a Common Mode Rejection Ratio (CMRR) of 35.83 dB and it results in achieving 8.17 V/V gain.